My favorite consumer event is the annual Powell’s on 57th Street Midnight Madness Sale, where every item (under $50) is half-off between 9pm and Midnight (if you own or buy a Powell’s T-shirt or tote bag). I sat out last year’s sale, mostly because I felt like I was running out of space for books, but I’ve moved since then, and space is the least of my concerns. The key is to get to the store early, maybe 8pm, while you can still move around freely. Alternately, showing up around 11-11:30 is ok, even if not quite as easy as earlier.

At first, the mix of drawn graphic novel panels and real photographs from the expedition in 1986 was jarring, but fortunately became less so as the story went on. The photographs of the Afghan mountains, the MSF expedition, and the mujahadeen (in the 80s when they were the “good guys”) were fantastic, and the tale was a grave reminder of how serious the work of groups like MSF are and how remote some parts of the world remain (and how human even the most remote remain). There was a short piece on the damage one tiny piece of shrapnel can do that will stick with me long after I forget this book.

The trouble with this kind of endeavor is that when you fall behind, you tend to fall way behind!

I’ll blame Sudhir Venkatesh’s “Off The Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor“ for getting me behind on this project. I wanted to say something meaningful about how easily the underground economies he writes about in 90s housing-project Chicago could stand in for situations of poverty anywhere. Changing the locations or currencies wouldn’t change anything essential about the kinds of social networks and webs that the poor need to survive in the face of the obstacles they encounter. “Off the Books” is a bit of a tough read though, as it’s caught somewhere between an old-school ethnography and the kind of literary pop-sociology that’s in vogue these days. I’ve got Venkatesh’s “Gang Leader for a Day” on the list for later this year (and saw Venkatesh speak at uchicago earlier this year).

Next, I indulged in a comparison of the photographic imagery of Harold Washington and Barack Obama. We often forget the momentousness of the occasion of Harold Washington’s election as mayor of Chicago held for Chicagoans (of every sort) and African-Americans across the nation. Harold Washington was elected Mayor of Daley’s Chicago! Needless to say that without Washington, you simply do not create the environment from which a Barack Obama could rise to prominence.

Being obsessed with the professionalization of do-goodery, I was drawn to Michael Maren’s scathing look at USAID, the UN, and to a lesser degree the Peace Corps, in “The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity“, which focuses on his post-peace corps experiences in Somalia working with USAID, CARE, and Save the Children. I’d like to believe that the wild west of rampantly unaccountable /unethical foreign aid and international charity that Maren exposes is a thing of the past. I can’t really believe that it’s over though, and know that the structural ties between the foreign AID industry, the farm and pharmaceutical industries, the charities, and the US Government (and the UN too) are all still in place. Maren’s accounting of his time in Somalia showed how the short-sightedness of the development industry exacerbated existing problems and created new (worse) problems, and ultimately did very little to help the intended people. The open questions now are to what degree have these kinds of programs / problems been solved, and to what degree do they still exist?